Countless distributors across the world are dealing with numerous suppliers and retailers each day. Thus, distributor management systems have become extremely crucial for sustaining FMCG businesses.
From production to delivering products to consumers, each step in the FMCG supply chain needs meticulous distribution management to meet the demands of the market. For this, distribution management systems are paramount.
In this article, we will look at why DMS software is vital for FMCGs to survive and thrive. Let’s begin.
Understanding Distribution Management System (DMS)
A DMS is a comprehensive software suite that helps optimize and manage the distribution of goods and services from the production to the FMCG retailers.
An advanced and modern DMS solution facilitates streamlining distribution operations, enhancing efficiency, and reducing costs.
Why is a DMS important?
Understanding how your distributors work, how they place orders, track their distribution and inventory, and maintain dealer relationships – knowing all of these data points are crucial metrics for your business.
What you need here is a DMS like Sokrio to help your teams be structured and trained to collect feedback, store it in a central system, and have automated workflows set up to promote better relations between your distributors, your agents, and your backend teams. These are related to a DMS solution. That is why it’s important.
Features of DMS that Boost FMCG Business
A DMS has many features that help in FMCG businesses. Each of these components plays a specific and crucial role in ensuring the effective management of distribution networks, highlighting the complexity and integrated nature of modern DMS.
Let’s look at them briefly.
Supply chain & logistics
When talking about supply chain, it basically involves the steps needed to get a product or service from the supplier to the end customer.
It is the network of a company that includes people, entities, information, and resources required to source raw materials and deliver them to production, transportation, and delivery of the final product to customers.
Purchase Order and Invoicing System
This component is where orders are made and managed. The progress of the order is tracked, from the customer making the order to the seller placing it in the inventory or warehouse end to ensure the final product is ready for delivery.
Invoices are created to track the payment required and payment is made properly.
Vendor and customer relationship management
In this element of DMS, a company sets strategies, practices, and technologies that help them to manage and analyze vendor or supplier as well as customer communications and data throughout the whole system.
This process helps to better business dealings with vendors and customers which helps to retain these stakeholders for longer times. This process features tracking each interaction with concerned parties whether providing service or sales.
Inventory Management system
This component allows businesses to track goods across their distribution network. It streamlines the inventory at warehouses and ensures linking them with order placement mapping the complete journey of a product till delivery to the concerned customer.
With Sokrio, you can gain real-time visibility into stock levels, locations, and movement, enabling accurate demand forecasting and minimizing stockouts.
The DMS also reduces carrying costs and enhances order fulfillment.
Warehouse Management
This component boosts warehouse functionality matters and facilitates management of daily planning, organizing, work distribution, and controlling resources in the warehouse.
Here companies get the proper support needed to move and store materials in and out of the warehouse, keeping track of the movements.
Transport Route Tracking Management
The final stage of a DMS is transportation management. Here, the cycle completes with the delivery of the raw materials to the company, then to dealers and retailers, and finally to the customers. But to manage and monitor that, you need real-time, robust tracking.
Reporting and Analytics
DMS provides robust reporting and data analytics. It generates insights into distribution performance, inventory turnover, delivery times, and customer satisfaction.
These insights help businesses make informed decisions to improve distribution operations.
Products like Sokrio ensure real-time tracking of vehicles or carriers from one place to another. This helps to eliminate lag times and deviations on the route.
Benefits of DMS in FMCG Business
DMS helps FMCG businesses in many ways. Some of the more prominent ones are as follows:
Effective production planning and inventory management
A Distributor Management System (DMS) integrated into the demand planning module of your Enterprise Resource Planner (ERP) works best for you.
An integrated DMS streamlines an ERP system’s production planning engine. This helps to have essential information on the current stock level and pending orders.
This smart production planning is the stepping stone in automating your distribution and supply chain processes, and improving inventory management.
An efficient DMS helps you avoid overstocking or stockouts by tracking inventory levels at different points in the supply chain, maintaining optimal inventory, reducing wastage, and improving cash flow.
Order management and sales tracking
DMS can enhance sales by automatically tracking sales data from distributors and retailers.
DMS automates the tracking of orders from start to finish by monitoring order placement and status, quantities, movement from warehouse to delivery, and timelines, ensuring proper fulfillment and reducing errors in the process.
Through DMS, FMCG companies can analyze patterns and trends of the orders. This data feeds into understanding consumer behavior, product performance, and market dynamics.
Eventually, the automated reports and data boost sales as more accurate KPIs are set as per trends and demands of distributor points and regions.
Stronger route optimization and customer service
An important aspect of distribution is the route a product takes from manufacture to order placement to delivery.
An efficient and automated DMS can track and analyze delivery and transport routes, ensuring reduced logistics delivery times.
In the FMCG sector, route optimization is crucial, because it maintains product freshness and relevance.is a deal breaker.
A robust delivery tracking system of a DMS helps you to improve customer service.
For instance, tracking orders and resolving delivery issues quickly not only builds stronger relationships with distributors but eventually increases the satisfaction of the customers at the end of the supply chain.
Supply Chain Visibility for Improved Decision Making
Automated monitoring allows FMCG companies to see and check the movement of goods, from manufacturing to the end consumer. This also allows them to identify bottlenecks or inefficiencies in the supply chain.
The supply chain data provided by DMS helps you make better and more precise decisions about your distribution network.
For instance, you can more accurately find out underperforming distributors or distribution points and set optimal pricing.
You can also identify loopholes at the supplier or backend of the products/raw materials and allocate inventory more effectively.
Performance Analysis to Minimize Errors
As remote work and settings are becoming accepted, FMCG companies are looking for ways to monitor different areas and regions across the country, especially rural districts that are harder to reach virtually.
Automated DMS monitors the performance of various channels, regardless of distance, across the distribution network.
This aspect provides more real-time insights into these regions’ effectiveness and performance.
Time and distance issues are reduced manifolds, helping FMCG companies to make informed decisions regarding the supply chain and distributor networks.
The improved and more accurate decisions minimize errors and risks of the distribution operations, increasing sales and bullet-proofing operational compliance.
Increased compliance and monitoring
An updated and robust DMS assists in monitoring the compliance of processes with regulatory standards and policies.
The compliance matters may include ensuring meeting company policies, having proper storage conditions, checking expiration dates are met, timely delivery management, adherence to various agreements, accurate sales tracking, etc.
A real-time DMS has the capacity to send automatic notifications and warnings when compliance is breached or critical issues like low inventory levels, delayed shipments, or sudden changes in demand occur.
The timely alerts vastly help managers and owners to take prompt action and mitigate potential problems, if not eradicate them completely.
A pivotal benefit that the Distribution Management System (DMS) offers is expediting the management of delivery claims.
The DMS automates and enhances schemes, returns, and damaged receipts, ensuring that distributors or customers have access to insights into the company’s payables and receivables and inform of problems at the earliest.
In addition, as claims are made online, all claims can be resolved much faster and consistently when compared to conventional manual systems.
A big relief of the automation is avoiding the frequent rounds of back-and-forth interactions among the parties involved.
Local Success Story: How Sokrio DMS Automates in FMCG Business
As the local economy is driven to a good degree by the FMCG industry, companies specializing in DMS are emphasizing injecting their operations into the FMCG markets.
One such example is Sokrio, which has successfully made its presence felt in the FMCG industry as a DMS provider. Let’s look at a couple of their game-changing success stories:
Story 1: Increase in Outlet Visits
From inventory management to sales optimization, Sokiro DMS software has been driving businesses into redefining operations, streamlining processes, and achieving remarkable growth in a relatively quick time, with a minimal amount of hassle.
For instance, a leading player in the Bangladesh FMCG industry offering soybean oil, palm oil, and sunflower oil along with different varieties of rice, faced challenges in managing and scheduling their outlet visits efficiently.
After availing of Sokrio Technologies and its automated Distribution Management System, the client witnessed a significant improvement in scheduled outlet visits.
Within just six months of using the system, an impressive 89% increase in the number of scheduled outlet visits was noticed.
Read the full success story here.
Story 2: Increase in Retail Sales
A renowned dairy products brand in the country, which started its mission to enhance its market presence and increase retail sales, turned to Sokrio DMS to streamline distribution processes.
In six months of implementing the Sokrio DMS, the client saw remarkable results, with a 20% Increase in retail sales through route optimization, real-time monitoring, insightful data, and streamlined distribution processes.
Read the full success story here.
Summing Up
As DMS solutions evolve, FMCG companies that make the best use of these systems will gain a competitive edge.
They can optimize operations, enhance product quality, make more data-driven decisions, and deliver superior customer experiences.
Companies like Sokrio can help enhance FMCG business through proper DMS installation and support.
With advanced and automated DMS solutions, FMCG businesses can streamline their operations and enhance the local industry as a whole.
